"Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
Nocturnos lemures portentaque."
The hero Ambrosio is the abbot of St. Francis' Capuchin monastery in Madrid; a man of rigid austerity, whose spiritual pride makes him an easy prey to the temptations of a female demon, who leads him by degrees through a series of crimes, including incest and parricide, until he finally sells his soul to the devil to escape from the dungeons of the Inquisition and the auto da fe, subscribing the agreement, in approved fashion, upon a parchment scroll with an iron pen dipped in blood from his own veins. The fiend, who enters with thunder and lightning, over whose shoulders "waved two enormous sable wings," and whose hair "was supplied by living snakes," then snatches up his victim and soars with him to a peak of the Sierra Morena, where in a Salvator Rosa landscape of torrents, cliffs, caverns, and pine forests, by the light of an opera moon, and to the sound of the night wind sighing hoarsely and "the shrill cry of mountain eagles," he drops him over a precipice and makes an end of him.
A passage from the episode of Agnes de Medina, the incarcerated nun, will illustrate Lewis' wonder-working arts: "A faint glimmering of light which strained through the bars permitted me to distinguish the surrounding horrors. I was oppressed by a noisome, suffocating smell; and perceiving that the grated door was unfastened, I thought that I might possibly effect my escape. As I raised myself with this design, my hand rested upon something soft. I grasped it and advanced it toward the light. Almighty God! what was my disgust! my consternation! In spite of its putridity and the worms which preyed upon it, I perceived a corrupted human head, and recognized the features of a nun who had died some months before. . . A sepulchral lamp was suspended from the roof by an iron chain and shed a gloomy light through the dungeon. Emblems of death were seen on every side; skills, shoulder-blades, thigh-bones and other relics of mortality were scattered upon the dewy ground. . . As I shrunk from the cutting wind which howled through my subterraneous dwelling, the change seemed so striking, so abrupt, that I doubted its reality. . . Sometimes I felt the bloated toad, hideous and pampered with the poisonous vapors of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my bosom; sometimes the quick, cold lizard roused me, leaving his slimy track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and matted hair. Often have I, at waking, found my fingers ringed with the long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant."
"The Monk" won for its author an immediate and wide celebrity, assisted no doubt by the outcry against its immorality. Lewis tried to defend himself by pleading that the outline and moral of his story were borrowed from "The History of Santon Barsisa" in the Guardian (No. 148). But the voluptuous nature of some of the descriptions induced the Attorney General to enjoin the sale of the book, and Lewis bowed to public opinion so far as to suppress the objectionable passages in later editions. Lewis' melodrama "The Castle Specter" was first performed December 14, 1797, at Drury Lane, ran sixty nights and "continued popular as an acting play," says the biographer, "up to a very recent period."[36] This is strong testimony to the contemporary appetite for nightmare, for the play is a trumpery affair. Sheridan, who had a poor opinion of it, advised the dramatist to keep the specter out of the last scene. "It had been said," explains Lewis in his preface, "that if Mr. Sheridan had not advised me to content myself with a single specter, I meant to have exhibited a whole regiment of ghosts." The prologue, spoken by Mr. Wroughton, invokes "the fair enchantress, Romance":
"The moonstruck child of genius and of woe,"
who
"—Loathes the sun or blazing taper's light:
The moonbeamed landscape and tempestuous night
Alone she loves; and oft with glimmering lamp
Near graves new opened, or midst dungeons damp,
Drear forests, ruined aisles and haunted towers,
Forlorn she roves and raves away the hours."
The scene of the drama is Conway Castle in Wales, where abides Earl Osmond, a feudal tyrant of the "Otranto" type, who is planning an incestuous marriage with his own niece, concerning which he thus soliloquizes: "What though she prefer a basilisk's kiss to mine? Because my short-lived joy may cause her eternal sorrow, shall I reject those pleasures sought so long, desired so earnestly? That will I not, by Heaven! Mine she is, and mine she shall be, though Reginald's bleeding ghost flit before me and thunder in my ear 'Hold! Hold!'—Peace, stormy heart, she comes." Reginald's ghost does not flit, because Reginald is still in the flesh, though not in very much flesh. He is Osmond's brother and Angela's father, and the wicked Earl thought that he had murdered him. It turns out, however, that, though left for dead, he had recovered of his hurts and has been kept unbeknown in solitary confinement, in a dungeon vault under the castle, for the somewhat long period of sixteen years. He is discovered in Act V., "emaciated, in coarse garments, his hair hanging wildly about his face, and a chain bound round his body."
Reginald's ghost does not flit, but Evelina's does. Evelina is Reginald's murdered wife, and her specter in "white and flowing garments, spotted with blood," appears to Angela in the oratory communicating with the cedar room, which is furnished with an antique bedstead and the portrait of a lady on a sliding panel. In truth, the castle is uncommonly well supplied with apparitions. Earl Herbert rides around it every night on a white horse; Lady Bertha haunts the west pinnacle of the chapel tower; and Lord Hildebrand may be seen any midnight in the great hall, playing football with his own head. So says Motley the jester, who affords the comedy element of the play, with the help of a fat friar who guzzles sack and stuffs venison pasties, and a soubrette after the "Otranto" pattern.
A few poems were scattered through the pages of "The Monk," including a ballad from the Danish, and another from the Spanish. But the most famous of these was "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," original with Lewis, though evidently suggested by "Lenore." It tells how a lover who had gone to Palestine presented himself at the bridal feast of his faithless fair one, just as the clock struck one and the lights burned blue. At the request of the company, the strange knight raises his visor and discloses a skeleton head: